AFFINEUR

Milk in, wheels down, and time does the rest.

AFFINEUR is a free cheese-cave incremental that plays in your browser. An affineur is the person who ages cheese. In most idle games you make a thing and sell it at once. Here, what you make is worth more the longer you keep it, up to a point, and a wheel on the shelf is money you cannot spend yet. So the question the game keeps asking is: sell now, or wait?

Three things that pull against each other

• The milk. Every morning the herd fills the vat: a flood in spring, a trickle in winter. What the vat cannot hold is lost, so a bigger herd means making more cheese.
• The cave. Every gallery you dig is colder and damper than the one above. Deep galleries age a wheel more slowly, but each recipe has galleries it likes: a blue wants the damp deep, a washed rind the warm mouth. Quality rises where a wheel is happy and falls where it suffers.
• The market. Every seventh day buyers post orders for a cheese inside an age window, at a premium. The first is a regular who wants a wheel you already have; the others build reputation, and reputation unlocks washed rind, cave blue and the alpine wheel.

Every wheel is a small clock

Tap a wheel and it shows its own price curve: worth nothing green, sold young at a discount, climbing to its peak. An alpine keeps; a soft cheese turns and spoils. Tommes and alpines want turning every 7 days, washed rinds a wash every 4, and a blue must be pierced before 30 days or it never blues. A day has six hands in it until you hire turners. Every rind is grown by the game from the wheel's recipe and age, so no two wheels look alike.

The county fair

Each autumn the fair tastes the best wheel on your shelves (it does not take it). Bronze, silver and gold pay coins and reputation. Gold is aged, not made.

Nothing restarts

A spoiled wheel is lost stock, never a lost cave. It saves as you go, and while you are away the cave keeps aging, up to one season.

Controls: tap or click a wheel to read it, tend it, move it or sell it. Keys 1 to 4 change tabs, T tends everything due, S sells the chosen wheel, F toggles 3x speed, H opens the help, M turns the sound off. Plays on desktop and phones; on an upright phone it switches to its own tall layout.

Paid, from the same studio

• MILLWRIGHT ($5.99): raise three windmills so every farm's cart has the shortest road, and a mill stays where you raise it.
• The Turning Year ($9.99): one world drawn four times over; turn the season and hold it while the year pulls back.
• ROOTWORK ($5.99): grow a seed's roots down to every pool of water, where every cell costs sugar.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and text were written with AI assistance. Every picture in the game is drawn by code written for it (the rinds, the shelves, and two material plates from our procedural pixel engine); the cover was made with an image model. The music and the sound effects are synthesised by code, with no generative audio model.

More free browser games: COMBWRIGHT, HALFLIGHT, ANAGAMA. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.